Ross Douthat

More on Red and Blue Families

By ROSS DOUTHAT

May 11, 2010

Via Eve Tushnet, I see that Maggie Gallagher got there first on the point I made in yesterday’s column — namely, that a lot of the differences between “red” and “blue” family structures, as sketched in Naomi Cahn and June Carbone’s recent book, are driven by higher abortion rates in liberal states. And it really is striking, when you dig into the data, how much of the blue-state advantage in preventing teen births is made possible by abortion. Rhode Island’s teen pregnancy rate is identical to West Virginia’s, but West Virginia’s teen birth rate is 33 percent higher. California’s teen pregnancy rate is higher than Alabama’s, but California’s teen birth rate is 20 percent lower. Kentucky and Maryland have the same teen pregnancy rates, but Kentucky has almost 60 percent more teenage births. And so on …

This data isn’t a problem for many abortion supporters of the old school, who would argue that of course abortion is essential to post-sexual revolution family stability — and that’s why they’re for it! It’s more of a problem, though, for the quasi-anti-abortion argument that Slate’s Will Saletan, among others, frequently advances, which posits that liberal funding for contraception and comprehensive sex education, rather than legal sanctions and moral stigma, are the best way to reduce the abortion rate. This “pro-life case for Planned Parenthood,” in Saletan’s vivid phrase, has obvious intuitive appeal if you’re pro-choice but uncomfortable with abortion. But it would be much more persuasive if abortion rates weren’t higher in liberal (and Planned Parenthood-friendly) states than in conservative ones.

Also, speaking of Eve Tushnet, her critique of the red families/blue families storyline, and then her follow-up post on the same subject, are both very much worth your time. She’s particularly good on a related issue I was trying to get at in my column, which is the way that conservatives and liberals look at the same data about family stability and then tell very different stories about it. The right talks about a “marriage gap” between the upper-middle class and everybody else (if I were teaching a class on modern American family life, I’d have students read Kay Hymowitz’s “Marriage and Caste in America” alongside Cahn and Carbone), while the left emphasizes the success of blue America and the failures of red America:

The more I think about this red/blue families thing the more it seems like the r/b narrative and the “marriage gap” narrative are like those pictures which are a vase, but also two faces; or a duck but also a rabbit. The r/b narrative is the liberal one (not Left, but liberal) and the marriage-gap one is conservative. The r/b narrative promotes one set of solutions and the marriage-gap narrative promotes a very different set. The r/b narrative seems to emphasize politics and religion in its framing, while the marriage-gap narrative emphasizes poverty and race. Both often pay lip service to class (the intersection of economic status and culture, or the culture created by economic status) but really downplay it… which leads me to suspect that class is one of the biggest drivers of this divide.

For a somewhat more sympathetic take on the “red/blue” thesis, she recommends that you read Jonathan Rauch’s column on the subject. So do I.